nothing for the group is 4!

another year of your favorite niche theatre newsletter

Hi friends,

Nothing for the Group turns four on July 17th! (A Cancer, just like me.) Three-ish years ago, I launched paid subscriptions and many of you will start getting renewal notifications in the next two weeks. I do not miss writing subscription brochure text — I’ve spent too much of my one wild and precious life obsessing over evocative adjectives in marketing blurbs — but here are a few highlights from the newsletter’s senior year:

• Nothing for the Group’s readership is just shy of 8,000 subscribers (!) located in all 50 states and 75 countries (?!?) If your immediate reaction to those geographic stats was “sounds fake”, please know that was also my initial response. But Substack has maps illustrating the East Coast, West Coast, Worldwide reach:

  

  

  If you are my lone reader in North Dakota, Wyoming, South Africa, Peru, Indonesia, Ethiopia, or Chile: please email me and tell me everything about your life and theatre-going habits. (I’m sure some of these international subscribers are VPNs but let me bask in the illusion of a vast global readership.)

• I wrote 47 weekly round-ups sharing productions, workshops & readings, festivals, digital offerings, season announcements, various debacles and clownery, and the latest power moves in the regional theatre game of thrones. Each round-up averages 10,200 views (!) and the newsletter as a whole receives 60,000 monthly views (?!?). I don’t advertise, so Nothing for the Group’s continued growth is entirely due to you. Thanks for sharing it with friends, forwarding it around your office, and including it on your syllabi. (I love getting fifteen consecutive sign-ups from the same university email suffix.)

• Nothing for the Group partnered with 3Views on Theater and Rescripted to co-publish Annalisa Dias’ viral essay Decomposition Instead of Collapse and a three-part response series from artists. I had never published guest essays before, but two of the core values of this newsletter are amplifying inventive work and ideas and interrogating field-wide narratives. Annalisa’s writing challenged and reframed the repetitive glut of crisis reporting — and it was an honor to collaborate with my two favorite independent critical platforms.

• Jenna and I published 12 Bills, Bills, Bills money diaries from theatre workers across the country. This year’s anonymous diarists included a lighting designer in an out-of-town tech, a director with an inheritance, a sound designer building a tiny house, a Broadway stagehand, working parents, and our first-ever column from an artistic director. Thank you so much to our contributors for their generosity and openness — and solidarity with everyone fighting for fair wages and salary transparency. (A regular reminder that we accept diarist submissions on a rolling basis!)

• I also wrote several additional pieces, including a DC Theatre Season Preview, The 2023 Year in Review, and a few 2024-25 season announcement analyses (with more to come this summer!)

If I was a more shrewd businesswoman, I would publish Bills, Bills, Bills and the DC Theatre Season Preview as paid subscriber-only content. But pay-walling those features feels antithetical to the spirit of signal-boosting and advocacy, especially given the ongoing labor movement and DC’s dwindling local arts coverage.

The weekly Friday round-ups and Bills, Bills, Bills will always be free for everyone — and paid subscriptions help ensure that. The revenue compensates me for my time and labor and allows me to practice my own values when it comes to paying folks for their work: editorial support (all hail Ryan Adelsheim!); Bills, Bills, Bills contributors; and many subscriptions to newspapers, magazines, and trade publications.

As always, there are three subscription tiers:

• $100 a year

• $50 a year

• $5 a month

If you’re an existing paid subscriber, you will receive an email notification seven days before your auto-renewal date. If you’re currently a free subscriber, you can upgrade to a paid tier by clicking the subscribe button below. Payments are securely processed via Stripe. (The lone upside of Substack handling payments — and taking 10% of my earnings — is that it’s very hands-off for me, but if you run into issues, let me know and I can help. Substack also has a good reader FAQ on subscriptions and payments.)

If you want to monetarily support the newsletter but you don’t want to buy a subscription, you can always Venmo (@halvorsen) or Paypal. (I’m only including this info because multiple people have asked! No pressure!)

I completely understand if your financial situation has changed this year. I never take it personally when someone cancels their subscription. (I publish a whole column dedicated to demystifying compensation and advocating for living wages! You don’t have to justify your budgetary priorities to me.) I don’t expect anyone’s paid subscription to last forever and I’m very moved by your generosity, no matter how long it lasts. There are many ways to support Nothing for the Group: reading and sharing the round-ups and essays, sending me nice emails to counteract all the grade-A bonkers ones, or attending the featured plays and events.

People frequently ask me if I’d ever consider returning to institutional literary management. I miss thinking about plays and working with artists every day. (I do not miss the persistent guilt of a mounting to-read pile or writing complimentary program notes about mediocre men.) But theater is a weird, unstable industry and after witnessing multiple rounds of layoffs across the country, working in an artistic department now requires an insurmountable level of cognitive dissonance. I could never work that hard again knowing that my job is likely considered one of the most expendable positions at a company.

I love writing this newsletter. It’s become a delicate high-wire act to balance my full-time day job with freelance writing, dramaturgy, and expansion dreams for this project. (I live in fear of girlbossing too close to the sun.) I haven’t cracked the ideal, sustainable split between artistic work and corporate-gig-for-health-insurance. I doubt I ever will! But Nothing for the Group gives me purpose and agency, untethered from institutions and on my own terms. Thank you for reading, whether you just signed up or you’ve been subscribing since day one. I’m thrilled you’re here.

xo
Lauren